(HBCU - historically black college/university)
It all began with a post on Twitter. It was 2020 during the height of the pandemic and LaDarrion Williams was thinking about the lack of diversity in the fantasy genre. He proposed: “What if Harry Potter went to am HBCU in the South?”
“Growing up, I watched ‘Twilight,’ I watched ‘Hunger Games’ and ‘Divergent’ and ‘Percy Jackson,’ which is one of my favorite books. I didn’t see myself in those stories, and I didn’t feel seen by them,” said Williams. He is a self-taught playwright, filmmaker and screenwriter.
The post went viral and started a dialogue online, leading Williams down a long road to make good on his idea. He’s the first to admit though that the process was not a fairytale.
Williams’ “Blood at the Root,” the first in a three-book deal, arrives in stores Tuesday. Jalyn Hall (“Till”, “All American”) recorded the audio version. The book follows Malik, a 17-year-old with magical powers who gets accepted into Caiman University, an HBCU with a “Blackgical culture” and a magic program.
It sucks how minorities are underrepresented in “regular” (for lack of a less biased term) works, so they feel the need to compensate by creating works that highlight said minority, which not only then get sorted into an “ethnic” genre ghetto but also make it even harder to create “regular” works that happen to have minority cast members for fear of them being marginalized as well.
(I worry that might come off as victim-blaming, but if so it’s only because I didn’t express myself well. My intent is to lament the structural problems of the situation, not to suggest that minorities shouldn’t create works that better represent them. If there’s blame to be had here, it lies with white audiences being too quick to ignore “ethnic” works and/or publishers too fearful of such audiences to give minority creators a fair chance.)
It doesn’t help when Rowling decides that a character who she clearly describes in her novels as being white is actually a token black character because “white skin was never specified.” (It was.) Then there was her deciding Dumbledore was a token gay character despite never saying anything about it in the books because someone criticized her for not having gay characters.
let’s hope that JK Rowling doesn’t put her nose in this with her over_inflated copyright pretenses.
Well fucking done, easy to complain, fuck I do it regularly, but LaDarrion put the effort to actually make something where he identified a lack. He stands head above most in actually writing a book and then it mentions he is self taught, may his endeavours yield all the fruit he has sown and tended to
